I never thought I'd be a programmer. I actually took HTML in grade school (late 90s) and C++ in high school, but they didn't stick. (Of course now I wish they d

I never thought I'd be a programmer. I actually took HTML in grade school (late 90s) and C++ in high school, but they didn't stick. (Of course now I wish they did!) I originally went to school for TV production, which I had worked in at a local news station all through high school, but wound up getting into a band, took some time off to try that out, and then went back to community college for music. I started hacking around with windows mobile circa 2006, not really programming but taking the OS apart and making custom ROMs and whatnot. A while later I decided to take a networking course as an elective, because I had been getting more interested in tech. The teacher was all about networking as a field that you didn't have to get more than a two year degree plus some certs for, and I thought hey, I like this enough, they'll be plenty of jobs, and it's not much school. So I changed my major. The next year my mom (who teaches at a college) said "Go see if they have any internships", so I did. The lady at the department checked what she had and said "Here's something at (a major media company) as a web producer, is that applicable to your major?" "Sure!" I half-lied immediately, because it sounded very cool. The internship was great, but beyond just CMS/production stuff, they throw Javascript/JQuery at me. I got hooked immediately. I guess I was always a tinkerer and problem solver, but I hadn't realized how much fun solving all these little problems and getting to see what I built come to fruition was for me. I bought some books, started teaching myself web dev and Linux (which had always intrigued me, and by '08 I had a server running FreeBSD serving up my music collection for all my friends out of my parents' house. When I graduated with a network admin degree in '10, one of my teachers immediately got me a job at a liquor store doing web and IT. The great postscript to this is that today, after working in a few different places across the spectrum of web and hosting, I'm back at the media company as a software engineer.